Michael I. Jordan calls AI doom talk sci-fi and a 'grand moralizing performance'
Michael I. Jordan, professor emeritus at UC Berkeley and a pioneer of machine learning, told France's Libération that the AI doom discourse of summer 2026 is 'extremely depressing,' and that he warned as early as 2019 that the term 'AI' was being overused. He described AI companies' calls for regulation as theater, and called the alarm sparked by the early-September resignation of young Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon a 'grand moralizing performance,' saying many such employees come from humanities and philosophy backgrounds rather than engineering. He was especially critical of Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton, saying none of the steps in Hinton's argument that brains can be reproduced in silicon and scaled into superintelligence hold up, while he was more forgiving of Yoshua Bengio.